Arts & Culture | Film

The annual New Directors/New Films program, now in its 41st year, brings together a program of more than two dozen films from all over the globe, and the only common ground between them is work by fairly new directors who show promise. The programming results in some wild juxtapositions. This year’s event, which opened this week, is typical.

Although the film “Free Men” was made in France last year and opens here on Friday, March 16, it feels a lot older. In some ways, that’s not a bad thing. Director Ismail Ferroukhi turned to the straightforward, linear narrative style of the place and period in which the film is set, Paris under the Nazi occupation, and to a subdued palette that gently suggests the black-and-white films of the era.

Gideon Koppel bristles a little when you call his lyrical debut feature film ‘sleep furiously’ a documentary.

“For me the film is a fictional construct,” he says. “I’m at loggerheads with the way in which many academics and critics use the word ‘documentary.’ For me [the documentary] has always been linked to the world of the lyrical, the poetic and the avant-garde.”

Judaism is unique among the Abrahamic faith traditions in giving pride of place to the study of sacred texts, even within the liturgy. The traditional morning service includes both the blessing for study of Torah and passages from the Talmud relating to the sacrifices offered in the Temple a couple of millennia ago.

“Footnote,” the latest film from Joseph Cedar, an American-born Israeli director, will be released in U.S. theaters on Friday, March 9. But already the film has received enormous attention. It was a finalist for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. (It lost to Iran’s “A Separation.”) But it has already won a big prize at Cannes and Best Picture at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s Oscar-equivalent. “Footnote” tells the story of two feuding Talmud scholars, a father and son, at Hebrew University. The younger one is more successful. Cedar, 43, spoke about the film this week from Los Angeles, where he was attending the Academy Awards.